[stevetursi]

I agree with the arguments (usually made by Apple fans, and I don't mean that as a pejorative) that Apple is probably in their legal rights and that it makes dollars and cents business sense for them to limit iMessage to iOS as much as possible.

But it's still a shitty thing to do. I have a tremendous amount of respect for companies that do things that are contrary to business objectives because they're the right thing to do. In this case, Apple chose to do the shitty thing.

[dkonofalski]

I don't have an opinion on this either way but why is that "the right thing to do" in your mind? It seems to me like making that available on non-Apple products would give very little benefit to them or their users while introducing lots of uncertainties that may actually make the experience worse for most users. The reason most Apple features work the way they do is because of the complete vertical integration of hardware and software. Introducing unknown hardware seems like a bad idea when consistency is your whole schtick.